Architecture After the Age of Printing (1992)

Transcription

1 Architecture After the Age of Printing (1992) Peter Eisenman These two essays by Peter Eisenman inaugurate digital discourse in architecture in the 1 990s, and highlight the continuity between Deconstructivism and the first age of digital design. The centrast between the photograph and the telefax, cited in both essays, refers less to image-making than to the different nature of mechanical and digital reproducibility: unlike mechanical copies, which once printed are fixed and stable, digital images derive from number-based notations, or files, that can morph and change all the time. ln Eisenman's reading, the new paradigm of electronic mediation destabilises and 'dislocates' centuriesold habits of anthropocentric vision, rooted in the monocular, perspectival tradition and in the modern technologies of mechanical reproduction, and should inspire and prod architects to further contest 'the space of classical vision' and break 'the gridded space of the Cartesian order'. ln the first essay Eisenman also refers to Gilles Deleuze's theory of 'the fold' (from Deleuze's book The Fo/d, Leibniz and the Baroque, first published in French in 1988, and which would inspire a seminal issue of AD, guest-edited by Greg Lynn with major contributions by Eisenman himself: see pages 28-47). Folding, Eisenman argues, may provide a new 'strategy for dislocating vision', by subverting the hierarchy of interior and exterior and by weakening the notational correspondence between drawing and building. The second essay republished here, 'The Affects of Singularity', does not mention Deleuze but refers to 'singularity' as a new ontological condition of the subject - significantly, not of the object, yet, Eisenman suggests, equally opposed to the mechanical ideas of standardisation and repetition, and in sync with the new technicallogic of electronics. Both Deleuze's 'fold' and the notion of digital singularity will become topoi of digital discoursein the 1990s. Similar notions of 'singularity' also generally refer to the new post-modern differentiation of subjects and objects alike. But in 1992 the digital is not yet a tool for a new mode of design, or even less for building; the rise of electronics is seen here as a general techno-cultural shift that should inspire architects to engage with an unprecedented cultural environment and with a new view of the world. Electronics, in Eisenman's view, vindicate and corroborate the stance of all the historical enemies of the dominion of the classical eye. Deleuze's Folding is seen as a new Deconstructivist weapon of choice, and the forthcoming digital fold as a continuation of Deconstructivism by electronic means.

2 Visions Unfolding: Architecture in the Age of Electronic Media ADSeptember-October 1992 During the 50 years since the Second World War, a paradigm shift has taken place that should have profoundly affected architecture: this was the shift from the mechanical paradigm to the electronic one. This change can be simply understood by comparing the impact of the role of the human subject on such primary modes of reproduction as the photograph and the fax; the photograph within the mechanical paradigm, the fax within the electronic one. Sight is traditionally understood in terms of vision. When I use the term 'vision' I mean that particular characteristic of sight which attaches seeing to thinking, the eye to the mind. in architecture, vision refers to a particular category of perception linked to monocular perspectival vision. The monocular vision of the subject in architecture allows for all projections of space to be resolved on a single planimetric surface. lt is therefore not surprising that perspective, with its ability to define and reproduce the perception of depth on a two-dimensional surface, should find architecture a waiting and wanting vehicle. Nor is it surprising that architecture soon began to conform itself in photographic reproduction the subject still maintains a controlled interaction with to this monocular, rationalising vision - in its own body. Whatever the style, space was constituted as an understandable construct, organised araund spatial elementssuch as the object. A photograph can be developed with more or less contrast, texture or clarity. The photograph can be said to remain in the control of human vision. The human subject thus retains its function as interpreter, as discursive function. With the fax, the subject axes, places, symmetries, etc. Perspective is even more virulent in architecture than in painting because of the imperious demands of the eye and the body to orient itself in architectural space through processes of rational perspectival ordering. lt was thus not is no Ionger called upon to interpret, for reproduction takes place without any control or adjustment. The faxalso challenges the concept of originality. While in a photograph the original reproduction still retains a privileged value, in facsimile transmission the original without cause that Brunelleschi's invention of one-point perspective should correspond to a time when there was a paradigm shift from the theological and theocentric to remains intact but with no differentiating value since it is no Ionger sent. The mutual devaluation of both original and copy is not the only transformation affected by the electronic paradigm. The entire nature of what we have come to know as the reality of our world has been called into question by the invasion of media into everyday life. For reality always demanded that our vision be interpretive. How have these developments affected architecture? Since architecture has traditionally housed value as weil as fact, one would imagine that architecture would have been greatly transformed. But this is not the case, for architecture seems little changed at all. This in itself ought to warrant investigation, since architecture has traditionally been a bastion of what is considered to be the real. Metaphors such as hause and home, bricks and mortar, foundations and shelter attest to architecture's role in defining what we consider to be real. Clearly, a change in the everyday concepts of reality should have had some effect on architecture. lt did not because the mechanical paradigm was the sine qua non of architecture; architecture was the visible manifestation of the overcoming of natural forces such as gravity and weather by mechanical means. Architecture not only overcame gravity, it was also the monument to that overcoming; it interpreted the value society placed on its vision. The electronic paradigm directs a powerful challenge to architecture because it defines reality in terms of media and simulation; it values appearance over existence, what the anthropomorphic and anthropocentric views of the world. Perspective became the vehicle by which anthropocentric vision crystallised itself in the architecture that followed this shift. Brunelleschi's projection system, however, was deeper in its effect than all subsequent stylistic changes because it confirmed vision as the dominant discourse in architecture from the 16th century to the present. Thus, despite repeated changes in style from the Renaissance through Post-Modernism and despite many attempts to the contrary, the seeing human subject- monocular and anthropocentric- remains the primary discursive term of architecture. The tradition of planimetric projection in architecture persisted unchallenged because it allowed the projection and hence the understanding of a three-dimensional space in two dimensions. in other disciplines- perhaps since Leibniz and certainly since Sartre- there has been a consistent attempt to demonstrate the problematic qualities inherent in vision but in architecture the sight/mind construct has persisted as the dominant discourse. in an essay entitled 'Scopic Regimes of Modernity', Martin Jay notes that 'Baroque visual experience has a strongly tactile or haptic quality which prevents it from turning into the absolute ocular centrism of its Cartesian perspectivalist rival.' Norman Bryson, in his article 'The Gaze in the Expanded Field', introduces the idea of the gaze (/e regard) as the looking back of the other. He discusses the gaze in terms of Sartre's intruder in Being and Nothingness or in terms of Lacan's concept of a darkness that cuts across the can be seen over what is. Not the seen as we formerly knew it, but rather a seeing that can no Ionger interpret. Media introduce fundamental ambiguities into how and what we see. Architecture has resisted this question because, since the importation and absorption of perspective by architectural space in the 15th century, architecture has been dominated by the mechanics of vision. Thus architecture assumes sight to be pre-eminent and also space of sight. Lacan also introduces the idea of a space looking back which he likens to a disturbance of the visual field of reason. in some way natural to its own processes, not a thing to be questioned. lt is precisely this traditional concept of sight that the electronic paradigm questions. to signal a change from a Pagan to a Christian architecture. Piranesi created similar effects with his architectural projections. Piranesi diffracted the monocular subject by From time to time architecture has attempted to overcome its rationalising vision. lf one takes for example the church of San Vitale in Ravenna, one can explain the solitary column almost blocking the entry or the incomplete groin vaulting as an attempt

3 creating perspectival visions with multiple vanishing points so that there was no way of correlating what was seen into a unified whole. Equally, Cubism attempted to deflect the relationship between a monocular subject and the object. The subject could no Ionger put the painting into some meaningful structure through the use of perspective. Cubism used a non-monocular perspectival condition: it flattened objects to the edges, it upturned objects, it undermined the stability of the picture plane. Architecture attempted similar dislocations through Constructivism and its own, albeit normalising, version of Cubism - the International Style. But this work only looked cubistic and modern, the subject remained rooted in a profound anthropocentric stability, comfortably upright and in place on a flat, tabular ground. There was no shift in the relationship between the subject and the object. While the object looked different it failed to displace the other space, where in fact the space 'Iooks back' at the subject. A possible first step in conceptualising this other space, would be to detach what one sees from what one knows - the eye from the mind. A second step would be to inscribe space in such a way as to endow it with the possibility of looking back at the subject. All architecture can be said to be already inscribed. Windows, doors, beams and columns are a kind of inscription. These make architecture known, they reinforce vision. Since no space is uninscribed, we do not see a window without relating it to an idea of window, this kind of inscription seems not only natural but also necessary to architecture. ln order to have a looking back, it is necessary to rethink the idea of inscription. ln the Baroque and Rococo such an inscription was in the plaster decoration that began to obscure the traditional form of functional inscription. This kind of 'decorative' description was thought too excessive viewing subject. Though the buildings were sometimes conceptualised, by axonometric or isometric projection rather than by perspective, no consistent deflection of the subject was carried out. Yet Modernist sculpture did in many cases effect such a displacement of when undefined by function. Architecture tends to resist this form of excess in a way that is unique amongst the arts, precisely because of the power and pervasive nature of functional inscription. The anomalaus column at San Vitale inscribes space in a way that the subject. These dislocations were fundamental to Minimalism: the early work of Robert Morris, Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson. This historical project, however, was never was at the time foreign to the eye. This is also true of the columns in the staircase at the Wexner Center, however most of such inscriptions are the result of design intention, the taken up in architecture. The question now begs to be asked: why did architecture resist developments that were taking place in other disciplines? And further, why has the issue of vision never been properly problematised in architecture? will of an authorial subjective expression which then only reconstitutes vision as before. To dislocate vision might require an inscription which is the result of an outside text which is neither overly determined by design expression or function. But how could such an lt might be said that architecture never adequately thought through the problern of vision because it remained within the concept of the subject and the four walls. Architecture, unlike any other discipline, concretised vision. The hierarchy inherent in inscription of an outside text translate into space? Suppose for a moment that architecture could be conceptualised as a Moebius strip, with an unbroken continuity between interior and exterior. What would this mean all architectural space begins as a structure for the mind's eye. lt is perhaps the idea of interiority as a hierarchy between inside and outside that causes architecture to for vision? Gilles Deleuze has proposed just such a possible continuity with his idea of the fold. For Deleuze, folded space articulates a new relationship between vertical and horizontal, figure and ground, inside and out - all structures articulated by traditional conceptualise itself ever more comfortably and conservatively in vision. The interiority of architecture more than any other discourse defined a hierarchy of vision articulated by inside and outside. The fact that one is actually both inside and outside with architecture, unlike painting or music, required vision to conceptualise itself in this way. As long as architecture refuses to take up the problern of vision, it will remain within a Renaissance or Classical view of its discourse. Now what would it mean for architecture to take up the problern of vision? Vision can be defined as essentially a way of organising space and elements in space. lt is a way of looking at, and defines a relationship between a subject and an object. Traditional architecture is structured so that any position occupied by a subject provides a means for understanding that position in relation to a particular spatial typology, such as a rotunda, a transept crossing, an axis, an entry. Any number of these typological conditionals deploy architecture as a screen for looking at. The idea of a 'looking back' begins to displace the anthropocentric subject. Looking back does not require the object to become a subject, that is to anthromorphise the object. vision. Unlike the space of classical vision, the idea of folded space denies framing in favour of a temporal modulation. The fold no Ionger privileges planimetric projection; instead there isavariable curvature. Deleuze's idea of folding is more radical than origami, because it contains no narrative, linear sequence; rather, in terms of traditional vision it contains a quality of the unseen. Folding changes the traditional space of vision. That is, it can be considered to be effective; it functions, it shelters, it is meaningful, it frames, it is aesthetic. Folding also constitutes a move from effective to affective space. Folding is not another subject expressionism, a promiscuity, but rather unfolds in space alongside of its functioning and its meaning in space - it has what might be called an excessive condition or affect. Folding is a type of affective space which concerns those aspects that are not associated with the affective, that are more than reason, meaning and function. ln order to change the relationship of perspectival projection to three-dimensional Looking back concerns the possibility of detaching the subject from the rationalisation of space. ln other words, to allow the subject to have a vision of space that no Ionger space it is necessary to change the relationship between project drawing and real space. This would mean that one would no Iongerbe able to draw with any Ievei of meaningfulness the space that is being projected. For example, when it is no Ionger possible to draw a line can be put tagether in the normalising, classicising or traditional construct of vision; an that stands for some scale relationship to another line in space, it has nothing to do with

4 f the f h m 1nd to the eye. The deflection from that line in space reason o t e connect1on o means,that there no Ionger exists a one-to-one scale corresponden_ce. t e a primitive beginning. ln them the subject understands that My f o ld e d projec s ar... h I er Concept ualise expenence in space in the same way that he or he or s e can no ong she did in the gridded space. They attempt to provide thi_s dislocation of the subj_ect from effective space; an idea of presentness. Once the env1ronment becomes affect1ve, inscribed with another logic or an ur-logic, one which is no Ionger translatable into the vision of the mind, then reason becomes detached from vision. While we can still understand space in terms of its function, structure, and aesthetic - we are still within the 'four walls' - somehow reason becomes detached from the affective condition of the environment itself. This begins to produce an environment that 'Iooks back' - that is, the environment seems to have an orderthat we can perceive even though it does not seem to mean anything. lt does not seek tobe understood in the traditional way of architecture yet it possesses some sense of 'aura', an ur-logic which is the sense of something outside of our vision. Yet one that is not another subjective expression. Folding is only one of perhaps many strategies for dislocating vision - dislocating the hierarchy of interior and exterior that pre-empts vision. The Alteka Tower project begins simultaneously with an 'L' shape drawn both in plan and section. Here, a change in the relationship of perspectival projection to threedimensional space changes the relationship between project drawing and real space. ln this sense, these drawings would have little relationship to the space that is being projected. For example, it is no Ionger possible to draw a line that stands for some scale relationship to another line in the space of the project, thus the drawn lines no Ionger have anything to do with reason, the connection of the mind to the eye. The drawn lines are folded with some ur-logic according to sections of a fold in Rene Thom's catastrophe theory. These folded plans and sections in turn create an object, which is cut into from the ground fioor to the top. When the environment is inscribed or folded in such a way the individual no Ionger remains the discursive function; the individual is no Ionger required to understand or interpret space. Questions such as what the space means are no Ionger relevant. lt is not just that the environment is detached from vision, butthat it also presents its own vision, a vision that Iooks back at the individual. The inscription is no Ionger concerned with aesthetics or with meaning but with some other order. lt is only necessary to perceive the fact that this other order exists; this perception alone dislocates the knowing subject. The fold presents the possibility of an alternative to the gridded space of the Cartesian order. The fold produces a dislocation of the dialectical distinction between figure and ground; in the process it animates what Gilles Deleuze calls a smooth space. Smooth space presents the possibility of overcoming or exceeding the grid. The grid remains in place and the four wallswill always exist but they are in fact overtaken by the folding of space. Here there is no Ionger one planimetric view which is then extruded to provide a sectional space. lnstead it is no Ionger possible to relate a vision of space in a two-dimensional drawing to the three-dimensional reality of a folded space. Drawing no ~-- \ Eisenman Architects, Alteka Office Building, Tokyo, 199 1; folding diagrams and plan, Ievels five to seven. Courtesy of Eisenman Architects. Peter Eisenman.

5 Ionger has any scale value relationship to the three-dimensional environment. This dislocation of the two-dimensional drawing from the three-dimensional reality also begins to dislocate vision, inscribed by this ur-logic. There are no Ionger grid datum planes for the upright individual. Alteka is not merely a surface architecture or a surface folding. Rather, the folds create an affective space, a dimension in the space that dislocates the discursive function of the human subject and thus vision, and at the same moment creates a condition of time, of an event in which there is the possibility of the environment looking back at the subject, the possibility of the gaze. The gaze according to Maurice Blanchot is that possibility of seeing which remains covered up by vision. The gaze opens the possibility of seeing what Blanchot calls the light lying within the darkness. lt is not the light of the dialectic of Iight/dark, but it is the light of an otherness, which lies hidden within presence. lt is the capacity to see this otherness which is repressed by vision. The looking back, the gaze, exposes architecture to another light, one which could not have been seen before. Architecture will continue to stand up, to deal with gravity, to have 'four walls'. But these four walls no Ionger need to be expressive of the mechanical paradigm. Rather they could deal with the possibility of these other discourses, the other affective senses of sound, touch and ofthat light lying within the darkness.